"Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers," reports ZDNet, "requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware." Microsoft "wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor", according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu. Liu has proposed an RFC or request for comment that for now merely implements what are only the "absolutely necessary components to get things running... There will be a subsequent patch series to provide a device node (/dev/mshv) such that userspace programs can create and run virtual machines. We've also ported Cloud Hypervisor over and have been able to boot a Linux guest with Virtio devices since late July." Cloud Hypervisor is an experimental open-source hypervisor implementation from Intel written in the Rust programming language. It's a virtual-machine monitor that runs on top of KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor in the Linux kernel that's designed for cloud workloads...

Liu points out three more changes beyond amendments to the Hyper-V Top-Level Functional Specification. For example, Microsoft wants Linux to set up existing Hyper-V facilities differently. It also wants Linux kernel developers to change the kernel's behavior when accessing hardware memory in a way that affects driver access to the GPU and CPU that's being managed by an operating system memory manager. It's this issue that Microsoft engineers are least confident about and are asking for Linux developer support, according to Liu....

As Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, Scott Guthrie, told ZDNet last year, Microsoft's shift to Linux and open source started over a decade ago when it open-sourced ASP.NET. "We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community," explained Guthrie.

Esther Schindler (Slashdot reader #16,185), shares some thoughts from long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: We'd like an easy way to judge open-source programs. It can be done. But easily? That's another matter... Plenty of people have created systems to collect, judge, and evaluate open-source projects, including information about a project's popularity, reliability, and activity. But each of those review sites — and their methodologies — have flaws.
The article looks at a variety of attempts, including freshmeat.net; Eric Raymond's attempt to revive Freecode; GitHub's star (which Docker's co-founder calls a "bullshit metric"); Synopsys's Black Duck Open Hub (formerly Ohloh); and even Google Trends. But it wraps up by pointing out that Brian Profitt, Red Hat's Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager, is working with others on "Project CHAOSS," a new Linux Foundation project to make it easy to evaluate open-source projects.
This pulled together Grimoirelab and similar programs, such as Augur and Red Hat's own Prospector... Its metrics include what kinds of contributions are being made; when the contributions are made; and who's making the contributions. All of which are vital to understanding the overall health of a project.

CHAOSS is still a work in progress. Its official release is scheduled for February 2021... Ultimately, this data will be available to all, from end users to the project leads. "In fact, I hope this happens a lot, because we can refine our models more quickly," says Profitt.

An anonymous reader shares this enthusiastic report from ZDNet: Earlier this year, Linus Torvalds approved of adding drivers and other components in Rust to Linux.* Last week, at the virtual Linux Plumbers Conference, developers gave serious thought to using the Rust language for new Linux inline code. ["Nothing firm has been determined yet," reported Phoronix, "but it's a topic that is still being discussed."] And, now Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that its just-released Bottlerocket Linux for containers is largely written in Rust.

Mozilla may have cut back on Rust's funding, but with Linux embracing Rust, after almost 30-years of nothing but C, Rust's future is assured. Rust was chosen because it lends itself more easily to writing secure software. Samartha Chandrashekar, an AWS Product Manager, said it "helps ensure thread safety and prevent memory-related errors, such as buffer overflows that can lead to security vulnerabilities." Many other developers agree with Chandrashekar.

Bottlerocket also improved its security by using Device-mapper's verity target. This is a Linux kernel feature that provides integrity checking to help prevent attackers from overwriting core system software or other rootkit type attacks. It also includes the extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), In Linux, eBPF is used for safe and efficient kernel function monitoring.
* Linus's exact words were "people are actively looking at, especially doing drivers and things that are not very central to the kernel itself, and having interfaces to do those, for example, in Rust. People have been looking at that for years now. I'm convinced it's going to happen one day."

The article also reminds readers that AWS's Bottlerocket "is also designed to be quick and easy to maintain... by including the bare essentials needed to run containers..."

"Besides its standard open-source elements, such as the Linux kernel and containerd container runtime, Bottlerocket's own code is licensed under your choice of either the Apache 2.0 or the MIT license."

An anonymous reader quotes The New Stack: While there are some who may never get over the fact that the Istio service mesh, originally created by Google and IBM, will not be handed over to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the project took a big step this past week to assuage those who critiqued the project for being under a Google-majority control: Istio has introduced a new Istio steering committee.

According to the blog post, the new steering committee will consist of 13 seats, with four "elected Community Seats" and nine "proportionally allocated Contribution Seats," a change they say "solidifies our commitment to open governance, ensuring that the community around the project will always be able to steer its direction, and that no one company has majority voting control over the project." This final point is really the key to the announcement here, with them further and more explicitly clarifying later that "no single vendor, no matter how large their contribution, has majority voting control over the Istio project." To this end, they write, they have "implemented a cap on the number of seats a company can hold, such that they can neither unanimously win a vote, or veto a decision of the rest of the committee."

As for how those seats are allocated, the four Community Seats will consist of four representatives from four different organizations and will be chosen in an annual election. The nine Contribution Seats will be assigned to a minimum of three different companies "in proportion to contributions made to Istio in the previous 12 months," with this year's metric being merged pull requests.
But not everyone was satisfied. On Twitter AWS engineer Matthew S. Wilson called it "a crappy way to build a community," objecting to the way it's recognizing and rewarding open source contributions by company rather than by the individuals.

And Knative co-founder Matt Moore called it "what you get when a company wants to 'play community', but treat its employees as interchangeable cogs."

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Wired, written by Kevin Xu and Jordan Schneider. Xu is the author of Interconnected, investor and advisor of open source startups at OSS Capital, and served in the Obama White House. Schneider is the author of the ChinaTalk newsletter and host of the ChinaTalk podcast, posted on Lawfare. From the report: Open source is a technology development and distribution methodology, where the codebase and all development -- from setting a roadmap to building new features, fixing bugs, and writing documentation -- is done in public. A governing body (a group of hobbyists, a company, or a foundation) publicly manages this work, which is most often done in a public repository on either GitHub or GitLab. Open source has two important, and somewhat counterintuitive, advantages: speed and security. These practices lead to faster technological developments, because a built-in global community of developers help them mature, especially if the technology is solving a real problem. Top engineers also prefer to work with and on open source projects. Wrongly cast as secretive automatons, they are more often like artists, who prefer to learn, work, collaborate, and showcase what they've built in public, even when they are barely compensated for that work.

But doesn't keeping a technology's codebase open make it more vulnerable to attack? In fact, exposing the codebase publicly for security experts and hackers to easily access and test is the best way to keep the technology secure and build trust with end users for the long haul. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and open source is that sunlight in technology. Linux, the operating system, and Kubernetes, the cloud container orchestration system, are two of the most prominent examples. [...] Using open source technology is now the fastest way new products get built and legacy technologies get replaced. Yet as US policymakers develop their industrial policy to compete with China, open source is conspicuously absent.

By leaning on the advantages of open source, policymakers can pursue an industrial policy to help the US compete in the 21st century in line with our broader values. The alternative is to continue a top-down process that picks winners and losers based on not just technology but also political influence, which only helps individual firms secure market share, not sparking innovation more broadly. A few billion more dollars won't save Intel from its technical woes, but a healthier ecosystem leveraging open source technology and community would put the US in a better position for the future. Open source technology allows for vendor-neutrality. Whether you're a country or a company, if you use open source, you're not locked in to another company's technical stack, roadmap, or licensing agreements. After Linux was first created in 1991, it was widely adopted by large companies like Dell and IBM as a vendor neutral alternative to Microsoft's Windows operating system. In the future, chip designers won't be locked into Intel or ARM with RISC-V. With OpenRAN, 5G network builders won't be forced to buy from Huawei, Nokia, or Ericsson. [...] By doubling down on open source, America not only can address some of our most pressing technological challenges faster and more securely, but also revive relationships with our allies and deepen productive collaborations with the tech sector.

Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS, argues that the question of open source sustainability "is really a people problem."

But to make the case, he cites comments by Tobie Langel, formerly W3C's testing lead (and a former member of Facebook's Open Source and Web Standards Team) who's now founded an open-source strategies consulting firm whose clients include Mozilla, Intell, Google, and Microsoft. Much of the "open source sustainability" discussion has focused on the one thing that really needs no help being sustained: software. As Tobie Langel rightly points out, "Open source code isn't a scarce resource. It's the exact opposite, actually: It's infinitely reproducible at zero cost to the user and to the ecosystem." Nor is sustainability really a matter of funding, though this gets closer to the truth.

No, open source sustainability is really a people problem. Or, as Langel highlights, "In open source, the maintainers working on the source code are the scarce resource that needs to be protected and nurtured."

Over the past several weeks, I've interviewed a number of maintainers for popular open source projects. In every case, they talked about how they contribute because it's fun, but also acknowledged that some aspects of open source development can make it decidedly "un-fun" (e.g., demanding users who complain about missing features or existing bugs but don't contribute code or fixes). Most have found ways to turn their passion into financial independence, but Langel stresses that cash is critical to keeping open source humming along... "Without revenue, there is no maintenance, and without maintenance, the commons becomes toxic very quickly... As new security issues are discovered, open source code that isn't updated becomes a security risk..."

Langel is absolutely correct to argue, "In an ecosystem with infinite resources, the attention needs to be on the people taking care of and maintaining that resource, because that's where the bottleneck is." Again, that's partly a question of money, but it's even more a question of treating people with dignity and respect, while making open source communities a fun, welcoming place.

Slashdot reader #16,185 wrote regularly for the newsletter of a small-town computer users group. Now they've written an article for Ars Technica reminding readers that "The Homebrew Computer Club where the Apple I got its start is deservedly famous — but it's far from tech history's only community gathering centered on CPUs." Throughout the 70s and into the 90s, groups around the world helped hapless users figure out their computer systems, learn about technology trends, and discover the latest whiz-bang applications. And these groups didn't stick to Slacks, email threads, or forums; the meetings often happened in real life. But to my dismay, many young technically-inclined whippersnappers are completely unaware of computer user groups' existence and their importance in the personal computer's development. That's a damned shame... Computer groups celebrated the industry's fundamental values: a delight in technology's capabilities, a willingness to share knowledge, and a tacit understanding that we're all here to help one another...

Two things primarily made user groups disappear: first was the Internet — and the BBSes that preceded them. If you could articulate a question, you could find a website with the answer. But computers also became easier to use. Once personal computers went mainstream, troubleshooting them stopped being an esoteric endeavor.

The typical computer user group is gone now. For the exceptions, you can find an incomplete and mostly out-of-date list via the Association of PC User Groups, though online exploration may lead you to more options. For example, the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG) is the longest continually operating Commodore user group. Washington Apple Pi is still going strong, as is the Triangle Linux Users Group. IBM's user group, SHARE, began in the 1950s and continues to support enterprise users, though it's primarily a conference these days...

Hopefully tech will continue to inspire ways to get together with other people who share your enthusiasm, whether it's Raspberry Pi meetups, Maker days, or open source conferences such as Drupalcon or PyCon. You also continue the computer user group ethos by finding ways to help other tech enthusiasts locally. For example, Hack Club aims to teach skills to high school students. Hack Clubs are already in two percent of US high schools across 35 states and 17 countries, with about 10,000 students attending clubs and hackathons each year.

So even if computer user groups largely are a thing of the past, their benefits live on. User groups were the precursor to the open source community, based on the values of sharing knowledge and helping one another. And who knows, without user groups promoting a cooperative viewpoint, the open source community might never have taken off like it did.
The article includes photographs of the OS/2 community's magazine Extended Attributes, the M.A.C.E. Journal (for Atari users), the Commodore Eight Bit Boosters newsletter, and the 1979 publication Prog/80 ("dedicated to the serious programmer.")

And it also includes video of a 1981 visit to the Boston Computer Society by a 25-year-old Bill Gates.

Though Mozilla laid off 250 people last week, the Rust Core Team wrote a blog post Tuesday reminding the world that "the Rust project as a whole is very resilient to such events..." it is a common misconception that all of the Mozilla employees who participated in Rust leadership did so as a part of their employment. In fact, many Mozilla employees in Rust leadership contributed to Rust in their personal time, not as a part of their job. Finally, we would like to emphasize that membership in Rust teams is given to individuals and is not connected to one's employer. Mozilla employees who are also members of the Rust teams continue to be members today, even if they were affected by the layoffs...
But they've still got some news: We've developed legal and financial needs that our current organization lacks the capacity to fulfill. While we were able to be successful with Mozilla's assistance for quite a while, we've reached a point where it's difficult to operate without a legal name, address, and bank account. "How does the Rust project sign a contract?" has become a question we can no longer put off....

The Rust Core Team and Mozilla are happy to announce plans to create a Rust foundation. The Rust Core Team's goal is to have the first iteration of the foundation up and running by the end of the year... The various trademarks and domain names associated with Rust, Cargo, and crates.io will move into the foundation, which will also take financial responsibility for the costs they incur.... As an immediate step the Core Team has selected members to form a project group driving the efforts to form the foundation. Expect to see follow-up blog posts from the group with more details about the process and opportunities to give feedback...

We're excited to start the next chapter of the project by forming a foundation. We would like to thank everyone we shared this journey with so far: Mozilla for incubating the project and for their support in creating a foundation, our team of leaders and contributors for constantly improving the community and the language, and everyone using Rust for creating the powerful ecosystem that drives so many people to the project. We can't wait to see what our vibrant community does next.

InfoQ reports on a new security group that launched last week: Supported by The Linux Foundation, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) aims to create a cross-industry forum for a collaborative effort to improve open source software security. The list of initial members includes Google, Microsoft, GitHub, IBM, Red Hat, and more.

"As open source has become more pervasive, its security has become a key consideration for building and maintaining critical infrastructure that supports mission-critical systems throughout our society. It is more important than ever that we bring the industry together in a collaborative and focused effort to advance the state of open source security. The world's technology infrastructure depends on it."

Microsoft CTO for Azure Mark Russinovich explained clearly why open source security must be a community effort:

"Open-source software is inherently community-driven and as such, there is no central authority responsible for quality and maintenance. [...] Open-source software is also vulnerable to attacks against the very nature of the community, such as attackers becoming maintainers of projects and introducing malware. Given the complexity and communal nature of open source software, building better security must also be a community-driven process."
Also joining the group are Intel, IBM, Uber, and VMWare, according to Foundation's inaugural announcement, which promises its governance and decisions "will be transparent, and any specifications and projects developed will be vendor agnostic."

Microsoft just launched a new website "to showcase how it's embracing open source to 'bring choice, technology and community to our customers,'" reports ZDNet: Microsoft, under CEO Satya Nadella, has said and done a lot to shed its image as a pariah of Linux and open-source software communities. With a Linux kernel for Windows 10, GitHub, a new Android Surface Duo, and the commercial cloud as its main source of revenue, Microsoft is a very different company than it was 30 years ago when it was afraid open-source software would gobble up its intellectual property and revenues.

Nowadays, it's got a growing number of open-source projects, including its hugely popular cross-platform code editor Visual Studio Code (VS Code), .NET Core, the hit JavaScript-based programming language TypeScript, and new open-source Windows developer tools like PowerToys and Windows Terminal... According to the company, over 35,000 engineers at the company are using GitHub Enterprise Cloud to host and release official Microsoft open-source projects, samples, and documentation....

Jeff Wilcox, a software engineer with the Microsoft Open Source Programs Office, announced the new site Thursday. He notes that it is "built by the Ruby open-source project Jekyll (that also powers GitHub Pages)".

Ton Roosendaal, Chairman of Blender Foundation (which accepts donations to support activities to provide free and open accessible services for all Blender contributors), writes: Microsoft makes use of Blender to generate synthetic 3D models and images of humans that can be used to train AI models. For researchers, having access to high quality free/opensource 3D software has proven to be of great benefit for scientific projects. You can check some of their work here. To express their support, Microsoft is joining the Blender Foundation's Development Fund as a Corporate Gold member per July 1st, 2020. We at Blender are very proud of this support statement, it's another important signal that the industry migrates to open source and finds ways to contribute to it.

emil (Slashdot reader #695) writes: The advent of quantum computing poses a well-recognized threat to RSA and other well-known asymmetric cryptosystems. It has been four years since NIST opened the post-quantum cryptography competition, and we are seeing extensive delays compared to AES.

A new and (hopefully) quantum-secure SSH key exchange, based on NTRU Prime, has been present in OpenSSH since January 2019, first implemented in TinySSH shortly before. This key exchange is marked by OpenSSH as experimental, and not enabled by default.

For those ready to evaluate NTRU Prime, or otherwise seeking an SSH server with "state-of-the-art crypto" (as described by TinySSH author Jan Mojí), a complete procedure for a Musl build and Busybox container deployment is presented, with additional focus on supplemental servers and key conversion.

SUSE has released the next versions of its flagship operating system, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 Service Pack 2 and its latest infrastructure management program, SUSE Manager 4.1. ZDNet reports: SLE 15 SP2 is available on the x86-64, Arm, IBM POWER, IBM Z, and LinuxONE hardware architectures. This new Linux server edition is based on the Linux 5.3 kernel. This new kernel release includes upstream features such as utilization clamping support in the task scheduler, and power-efficient userspace waiting. Other new and noteworthy features include:

- Support for migration from openSUSE Leap to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). With this, you can try the free, community openSUSE Linux distro, and then, if you find it's a good choice for your business, upgrade to SLES.
- Extended Package Search. By using the new Zypper, SUSE's command line package manager, command option -- zypper search-packages -- sysadmins can now search across all SUSE repositories, even unenabled ones. This makes it easier for administrators to find required software packages.
- SLE Software Development Kit (SDK) is now integrated into SLE. Development packages are packaged alongside regular packages. - Python 3: SLE 15 offers full support for Python 3 development. SLE still supports Python 2 for the time being.
- 389 Directory Server replaces OpenLDAP as the LDAP directory service.
- Repository Mirroring Tool (RMT) replaces Subscription Management Tool (SMT). RMT allows mirroring SUSE repositories and custom repositories. You can then register systems directly with RMT. In environments with tightened security, RMT can also proxy other RMT servers.
- Better business continuity with improved SLE Live Patching. SUSE claims Live Patching increases system uptime by up to 12 months. SLE Live Patching is also now available for IBM Z and LinuxONE mainframe architectures.

As for SUSE Manager 4.1, this is an improved open-source infrastructure management and automation solution that lowers costs, identifies risk, enhances availability, and reduces complexity in edge, cloud, and data center environments. With SUSE Manager you can keep servers, VMs, containers, and clusters secure, healthy, compliant, and low maintenance whether in private, public, or hybrid cloud. That's especially important these days thanks to coronavirus pandemic IT staff disruptions. SUSE Manager 4.1 can also be used with the Salt DevOps program. Its vertical-market brother, SUSE Manager for Retail 4.1, is optimized and tailored specifically for retail. This release comes with enhancements for small store operations, enhanced offline capabilities and image management over Wi-Fi, and enhanced virtual machine management and monitoring capabilities. Simultaneously it can scale retail environments to tens of thousands of end-point devices and help modernize point-of-service rollouts.

The Linux Foundation Public Health initiative has chosen the Covid Tracker Ireland app as one of its first two open-source Covid-19 projects. From a report: Since its launch, more than 1.3m people have downloaded the Covid Tracker Ireland app, which was developed to help track the future spread of the coronavirus. Now, the app has been chosen as one of the first two open-source contact-tracing projects by the newly established Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) initiative. Nearform, the Waterford-based company that developed the app with the HSE, has been made one of the initiative's seven premium members, along with Cisco, Doc.ai, Geometer, IBM, Tencent and VMware. Under the project name 'Covid Green', the source code of the Irish app is being made available for other public health authorities and their developers across the world to use and customise. As part of the agreement, Nearform will manage the source code repository on GitHub. In its announcement, the LFPH pointed to the "extraordinarily high" adoption rate of the Covid Tracker Ireland app.

Microsoft-owned GitHub has finally moved its snapshot of all active public repositories on the site to a vault in Norway. ZDNet reports: GiHub announced the archiving plan last November and on February 20 followed through with the 21 terabyte snapshot written to 186 reels of film. GitHub cancelled plans for a team to "personally escort the world's open-source code to the Arctic" due to the coronavirus pandemic, leaving the job to local partners who received the boxed films and deposited them in an old coal mine on July 8. The archive is being stored in Svalbard, Norway, a group of islands that's also home to the global seed bank.

"The code landed in Longyearbyen, a town of a few thousand people on Svalbard, where our boxes were met by a local logistics company and taken into intermediate secure storage overnight," said Julia Metcalf, director of strategic programs at GitHub. "The next morning, it traveled to the decommissioned coal mine set in the mountain, and then to a chamber deep inside hundreds of meters of permafrost, where the code now resides fulfilling their mission of preserving the world's open-source code for over 1,000 years." The repository includes public code repositories and significant dormant repos. The snapshot consists of the HEAD of the default branch of each repository, minus any binaries larger than 100kB in size. Each repository is then packaged as a single TAR file, and for efficiency's sake, most of the data will be stored as QR codes. A human-readable index and guide will itemize the location of each repository and explain how to recover the data.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Google has announced it is launching a new organization, Open Usage Commons (OUC), to host the trademarks for three of its most important new open-source projects. These are Angular, a web application framework for mobile and desktop; Gerrit, a web-based team code-collaboration tool; and Istio, a popular open mesh platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices. While it only covers three Google projects, for now, OUC is meant to give open-source projects a neutral, independent home for their project trademarks. The organization will also assist with conformance testing, establishing mark usage guidelines, and handling trademark usage issues. The organization will not provide services that are outside the realm of usage, such as technical mentorship, community management, project events, or project marketing. "Having an entity like this does make some sense for a certain number of use cases," says Andrew "Andy" Updegrove, open-source standards and patent expert and founding partner of top-technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove. "The most obvious one is an unincorporated OSS project. An amorphous group of individuals can't own a trademark efficiently, so there's no way to protect the project name unless they agree on a singular owner. There are many cases where an individual member has owned a project mark, and that has often led to downstream problems. So simply having a neutral owner is a community good without going any farther than that."

Updegrove also said noted trademarks have usually been achieved by a project "approaching a host, like The Apache Foundation or Linux Foundation and asking them to take over as host. But that usually requires taking the project under the umbrella, and subject to the rules, of that foundation."

Updegrove wonders if there's "more to the story than meets the eye." He notes there is one important difference by only handing over the trademarks: "A project that is primarily important to a single vendor and primarily staffed and controlled by developers employed by that employer can continue to exercise effective control while avoiding the market suspicion that might arise if the vendor owned the mark." He suspects Google is doing this "to up the credibility of some of its projects [to the open-source community] while not taking the more extreme step of turning the project over to a foundation in connection with which a new and more independent governance structure is put in place."

Nokia has become the first major telecom equipment maker to commit to adding open interfaces in its products that will allow mobile operators to build networks that are not tied to a vendor. Reuters reports: The new technology, dubbed Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN), aims to reduce reliance on any one vendor by making every part of a telecom network interoperable and allowing operators to choose different suppliers for different components. Currently, Nokia along with Ericsson and Huawei supplies most of the equipment for building telecom networks and mobile operators can only pick one for each part of their network.

As part of the implementation plan, Nokia plans to deploy Open RAN interfaces in its baseband and radio units, a spokesman said. An initial set of Open RAN functionalities will become available this year, while the full suite of interfaces is expected to be available in 2021, the company said. Nokia, unlike other vendors, had been promising to participate in the development of open RAN technology and have joined several industry alliances.

Long-time Slashdot reader PCM2 shares a report from CBS News: Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday announced a new COVID-19 modeling website as well as new open-source tools designed to help California residents understand the data informing local health departments and empower what he called "citizen scientists." The governor introduced the new coronavirus modeling website [...] as a way for residents to see the raw data that is driving the decisions of state and county officials with full transparency.

The new website features three sections: a "Nowcast" section that provides the most current information on how fast COVID-19 is spreading in the state and by county; a "Forecasts" section that provides short-term COVID-19 forecasts in the state and by county; and a "Scenarios" section that projects the possible long-term impacts under different scenarios and responses to COVID-19, again for the whole state and by county. "We want to open up our site to 'netizen-tists' ... of citizen-scientists, people that are out there doing coding every single day," said Newsom. "We want to give them access through an open-source platform to all of the available data that we have, that I have, that our health professionals have, in a way that we don't believe has been done before anywhere in the United States. This is a deep dive for transparency and openness. This is a new resource that we are making available today."

Volkswagen wants to use an open-source approach to refine elements of a software-based car operating system being developed by the carmaker, Christian Senger, its board member responsible for digital services and software, said. From a report: With the advent of autonomous driving, carmakers have been forced to link up radar, camera and ultrasonic sensors and connect them to braking and steering components, something which requires thousands of lines of software code. "There is a race to create automotive operating systems. We are seeing that many non-automotive players are building up competence in this area," Senger told Reuters. By 2025, VW wants to increase its own share of software development on its cars to 60%, from 10% at present, and to design the electronics and vehicle architecture as well.

Volkswagen board member Thomas Ulbrich said in March that U.S. electric car manufacturer Tesla has a 10-year start on rivals when it comes to building electric cars and software. "In future there will likely be fewer automotive operating systems than carmakers," Senger explained. Volkswagen will define the core operating system but may seek an open source approach to enhance elements of it. "The operating system is not something that we will control on our own. We will define its core and then quickly include open-source components, to create standards. This will create opportunities for partnerships," Senger said.

The head of the Open Technology Fund (OTF) Corporation, which funds internet freedom projects and technologies, resigned Wednesday because she said she became aware of a lobbying effort that would push the group's funds toward closed-source tools rather than the open-source ones it has traditionally championed. From a report: In a resignation email sent to an OTF mailing list, Libby Liu, the inaugural OTF CEO, mentioned that the Trump administration had recently sworn in Michael Peck as the new head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which is the OTF's grantor. She said that she learned of lobbying efforts to push money to closed-source tools. "As you all know, OTF's flexible, transparent, and competitive funding model has been essential to our success in supporting the most secure and effective internet freedom technologies and innovative projects available," she wrote. "I have become aware of lobbying efforts to convince the new USAGM [U.S. Agency for Global Media] CEO to interfere with the current FY2020 OTF funding stream and redirect some of our resources to a few closed-source circumvention tools."